Conventionally, the “last mile” connection between a communication network and an end user has been provided by an electrical connection such as a telephone line, a cable television system or a satellite link. However, the speed of connections demanded by consumers will soon exceed the capacity of electrical connections and the substantially greater bandwidth offered by fiber optic-based connections will be required.
A number of alternatives exist in a optical fiber-based communication system to provide the last mile connection to the end user. For example, a single optical fiber may be provided for each potential end user. However, this approach is expensive. Alternatively, an optical fiber may be shared among a number of end users. In this case, a branch optical fiber extends from the shared optical fiber to each end user. One end of the branch optical fiber would be spliced to the shared optical fiber and the other end of the branch optical fiber would be connected to the end user's equipment. With conventional optical fibers, splicing the branch optical fiber to the shared optical fiber is expensive to perform, even at the time the optical fiber-based communication system is installed.
It is likely that, when an optical fiber-based communication system is initially installed, the number of end users who will opt to subscribe to the optical communication service will be small compared with the total number of potential end users. Under these circumstances, the cost of providing an optical fiber connection to all end users, regardless of whether or not they subscribe to the optical communication service, would significantly increase the initial installation cost of the optical fiber-based communication system. The initial installation cost could be reduced by providing connections only to actual end users. However, this approach gives rise to the problem of how to make simple and inexpensive connections to new end users who only decide to subscribe to the optical communication service after the initial installation of the optical fiber-based communication system has been performed. Existing proposals may not offer this capability, and those that do may require that service to end users already connected to the distribution fiber be interrupted when a new user connection is made. Such an interruption of service is unacceptable to the existing end users.
Thus, what is needed is a multiple end user optical fiber-based communication system that is structured to enable additional end users to be connected simply and inexpensively after the system has been initially installed and without the need to interrupt service to existing end users.